Linking Research With Practice: A Local Assessment Toolkit to Guide School Leaders
This tool helps teachers evaluate text complexity for literary and informational text, aiding teachers in their lesson and unit planning. In this brief resource, Karin Hess first describes the eight factors that affect text complexity. The resource includes the Hess Text Complexity Tools, which are...
Close Reading: What It Is, What It's Not
The topic for this segment of Bam! Radio (an all-education radio network that offers programming from top education organizations and leaders) is close reading. Guest Christopher Lehman, the Founding Director of the Educator Collaborative, defines and discusses what close reading is and is not.
Early Progress: Interim Report on Personalized Learning
The RAND Corporation, commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is conducting an ongoing study of schools using personalized learning practices. Personalized learning “is an educational approach in which teachers and schools create systems, tools, and methodologies that tailor...
A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas
In A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas, the National Research Council articulates a new approach to K-12 science education and outlines a broad set of rigorous expectations intended to support all students in achieving scientific literacy. It...
Relationships and convergences among the mathematics, science, and ELA practices
A product of the Stanford University Understanding Language initiative, this Venn diagram is a tool that effectively illustrates the overlap and grouping of student practices (and student capacities) from four sets of seminal documents: the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language...
Next Generation Science Assessment Project
The Next Generation Science Assessment (NGSA) team is developing technology-enhanced assessment tasks, rubrics, and accompanying instructional resources in physical science and life science for middle school classrooms. The project aims to create exemplary tasks that can be used during instruction...
Implementing the Common Core State Standards: A Primer on "Close Reading of Text"
The purpose of this primer is to assist teachers in understanding close reading and employing it in the classroom, which is an instructional emphasis of the Common Core. The primer addresses the following key questions:
Determining How Much Background Knowledge to Provide for ELLs
The topics of this blog post, written by ELL and literacy expert Diane Fenner, relate to close reading, Common Core, background knowledge, and English language learners (ELLs). There has been considerable debate regarding how much background knowledge is appropriate for ELL students, and this post...